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First, under the test used in both the majority and concurring opinions in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, the enacted legislation must have specifically named municipal entities in order to affect them; general wording (such as "any entity") doesn't work, and no executive action can change that.

Second, Federal law supersedes state law precisely insofar as the Federal government is allowed to legislate in the area at all, and the majority opinion in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League says Federal law can't make states allow their own municipalities to sell Internet.

The Federal Government can no more authorize a municipality to provide Internet service outside its "imaginary boundaries" than it may authorize a municipality to enforce its city ordinances outside its "imaginary boundaries". The geographic scope of the powers of municipalities is an internal matter of the organization of the state government for the same reasons the existence of ans such powers is an internal matter of the organization of the state government.

No, not "just like" that at all. There are three basic classes of entity in US constitutional law - the Federal Government, the states, and individual people. States are not organs of the Federal Government, but legally separate entities with independent rights and powers. On the other hand, municipalities are mere organs of the state.

Given the 8-1 decision in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League in 2004, it's essentially certain that this FCC action will be overturned by the courts. The FCC doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.

In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that federal law did not and could not preempt a Missouri state law that prohibited municipalities from providing Internet service. Of the eight-member majority in that case, five (Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Scalia, and Thomas) are still on the court.

As a constitutional matter, municipalities do not have any independent existence; they are organs of the state governments. Municipal governments only have whatever powers states choose to give them, and the federal government may not commandeer a state government. So if a state chooses to deny its municipalities the authority to sell Internet access (or sell it below a certain price), then no declaration from the FCC can give the municipality that power, nor require the state to give a municipality that power.

So, all this vote means is the FCC majority has decided to waste a bunch of taxpayer dollars losing a lawsuit.

The Win16 thing is hilarious given that you can run Win16 under WINE on 64-bit Linux. The processors are perfectly compatible with 16-bit protected mode code in 64-bit mode, it's just Windows that isn't.

. . . as long as they don't have to worry that it's their children who will be denied opportunities by being locked into a boutique language that gives them poorer access to employment, education, and even entertainment.

The problem with sophistry is that Aristotle himself arrived at the following "facts" through strict reasoning (as opposed to, you know counting or measuring:

(1) Women have fewer teeth than men

That's a very common lie about Aristotle, but it's false. The exact quote from Aristotle (On the Parts of Animals: Book III) is:

âMales have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made.â

That is, Aristotle did not "reason" that women had fewer teeth than men; he depended on a mistaken observation. Much like every textbook between 1923 and 1956 misreported the number of human chromosomes as 48 instead of 46 because of mistaken observation.

(Except, of course, more forgivable in Aristotle's case, because between tooth loss/decay and irregular rates of wisdom tooth formation, observations of human tooth number is a lot noisier than observations of human chromosome number. Lots and lots of textbooks managed to publish the 48 number right next to photographs clearly showing 46 chromosomes.)

The primary difference between the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet is that the Supreme Soviet at least officially had legislative powers, while the European Parliament is explicitly only allowed to rubber-stamp decisions made by the European Commission.

Oh, that's simple. The Russian tradition of conspiracy theory always blames the Jews. If you're the sort of person used to reading and believing conspiracy theories that justify Russia, it would take exceptional intellectual effort and insight to realize blaming the Jews makes no sense at all in a particular case.

But incarceration rate per population doesn't tell you if the population is being over-incarcerated unless you know the crimes-worthy-of-incarceration rate. If America's rate of crime-worthy-of-incarceration is several times the European, then it's perfectly natural the US has a several-times-higher incarceration rate.

Now, there are all sorts of difficulties in calculating such a rate. But it doesn't seem too unreasonable to guess that, however it's calculated, the general rate of crime-worthy-of-incarceration would correlate with the homicide rate. So, let's use the homicide rate as a normalizer. How many incarcerated persons does a country have per annual intentional homicide? Using the Wikipedia numbers for prisoners and annual intentional homicides, we get:

Thus, the US incarceration rate differential is within the normal variation seen in developed countries, after you account for the fact that the US has a lot more violent crime than other developed countries (as seen in its much higher homicide rate).